Really good point.
Professor at UVA Law, sometimes civil rights / criminal defense lawyer, full-time Ruth wrangler (RIP Haley). Stuff I write here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1785600
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Really good point.
This is the part that I think may be unconstitutional (apart from just awful policy)
The (proposed) ordinance is VERY bad. It goes beyond criminalizing "camping" or "sleeping"; it also makes it a crime for a homeless person to have any personal property that's not in their immediate possession and authorizes CPD to destroy it. Cruel, unhelpful, probably unconstitutional.
Yeah, it’s a trip, huh? Thanks for sharing; it’s a lot!
Hahaha, totally. Thanks!
Thanks, Kim! It’s been (and still is) a ride…
Feedback noted. Thanks! - Ruth (the dog)
3. Did you know, amongst all the other horrors in Gaza, that this happened? Statehood for DC and Palestine. That's all.
... thankfully that happened in Virginia, where (for now) she was able to get medical treatment, from a doctor in a safe facility, within 24 hours. But yeah, unending contempt and loathing for those politicians with the hubris to decide they know best, to limit personal bodily autonomy in that way.
2. I was pro-choice before all *this*. I'm more so now. A strange thing about this "journey" is that we've been on it together, and we very much haven't. When Kelly had her D&C, we both mourned the loss, but in fundamentally different (and incomparable) ways....
1. IVF is amazing (damn near miracle, even). But we can expand our family this way only bc we’ve got 2 good jobs, insurance, access to quality reproductive healthcare. It’s not classical eugenics, but it rhymes. Other countries have made IVF widely available and accessible; the U.S. chooses not to.
If you know us in real life, you probably know Kelly & I have spent the last 4 years trying to have a biological kid. (We've been pretty open about IVF, miscarriages, D&C, etc.). So, some good news: kid coming (🤞) Jan. '26! Not much to add beyond what Kelly wrote, but I guess a few extra thoughts...
If you haven't checked out the LPE Project syllabus bank you're missing out!! (also, if you are teaching an LPE or LPE-adjacent course, please send us your syllabus!) lpeproject.org/syllabi
Cool, cool.
Labor standing up for Free DC; DC showing solidarity with organized labor. (Pretty good turn out for 4PM on a Thursday.)
Copwatch.
This is indeed remarkable, because it's all on video and it's very difficult to believe that he didn't technically satisfy the elements of the offense. What this is, is a "fuck you" to the prosecution, and there's nothing they can do about it
Grand jury service is often thankless work. It’s also incredibly important. Especially in times like these. Thank you DC grand jurors.
(Meridian Pl NW just off 16th St NW … still scattered sirens and other police activity in the area. On the plus side, everyone on the neighborhood was coming out to scream at them.) video by @yoyokellyo.bsky.social
Good morning to everyone except the ATF and MPD officers who just kidnapped someone around the corner. Terrorizing everyone as little kids walked to the elementary school around the corner.
Also works at academic conferences.
Making them wear high-visibility vests over camo is such a good joke you couldn’t write it
Serious question: Has anyone seen or heard from Eleanor Holmes Norton in the last 3 weeks? (A letter drafted from her staff doesn’t count.) Seems like it would be a REALLY good to time to have an effective federal representative who wasn’t 88 years old. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
Tyfys
Counterpoint: Don't take legal advice ("of course this is unconstitutional") from people who haven't read the EO. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
Our neighborhood elementary school had a block party this morning to welcome back students. Lots of people came out to encourage them.
The number of people banging pots and pans in our neighborhood (Mt. Pleasant) is going up a little bit each tonight. Tonight there were a bunch of little kids, too. Every night at 8PM for five minutes. Until Trump’s occupation of DC is over.
ST. PAULI!!!!!! 🤎❤️
ST. PAULI!!!
At the command of the president, red states are sending armed troops to occupy a blue city based on a manufactured crisis, over the objections of that city's leadership and 80 percent of its residents. If this isn't authoritarianism, I'm not sure what is.
I'm old enough to remember the last time this was a thing a decade ago. Which I'm also old enough to remember that Hillary Clinton and a bunch of Democrats tried to score political points the same way, too.
So if the plan is to use "the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities," when are we going to find out the Smithsonian is violating Title VI?
This is a small article in the Salisbury (MD) Times in 1931, bottom of the first page. It explains that they will not be covering the "deplorable" lynching that occurred the night before, because the entire town was either there or has already spoken to someone who was.
"FREE DC" chants during the Washington Spirit game (From @wusa9 )
“Here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of… “ youtu.be/KrrOY0vwuPE?...
Free DC protest at 14th and U now.
Our neighborhood flag store is all sold out of DC flags.
maybe bro just likes huge trucks and is hilariously self-aware?
On the anniversary of the suicide of Rudolph Hess, more relevant than ever… youtu.be/OLkPwxcIji0?...
Near Chinatown in DC, just now. 🥪✊️ #FreeDC
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/u...
For context, there were riots here in 1991 after DC police shot and paralyzed a Salvadoran immigrant.
Say what you will about the Orleans Parish criminal court, but it's awful hard for the Russians to hack court records when they're all kept on papyrus in flooded basements.
"During a 2018 visit, Ratcliff said, she found Parker lying in his bed, his face surrounded by flies. The nurses did nothing and refused to let her help him, she said. Unable to swat the flies as they buzzed about, Parker did the only thing he could to bring himself some relief: He ate them."
The Parole Board (which took the time to directly address those viewing on YouTube to explain "medical furlough") just granted relief to Kentrell Parker. You can read about his extraordinary story here: lailluminator.com/2024/03/30/l...
Watching parole hearings is an infuriating and radicalizing exercise (which is why, I think, many jurisdictions insist on conducting them in secret). Louisiana livestreams them and they're worth watching: www.youtube.com/watch?app=de...
Realizing now (for the first time) that this amazing scene from Succession features Kristi Noem talking in the background. Well played, Succession.
Proud to have cut my teeth at Orleans Public Defenders. www.npr.org/2025/08/05/n...
I want my service dog trained by incarcerated workers, but only the RIGHT kind of incarcerated workers…
She said yes (five years ago)! @yoyokellyo.bsky.social
Andrew Cuomo couldn’t allow his first, tepid recognition of reality — that the Israeli government, with the full support of the Trump administration, is starving the people of Gaza — last more than a few hours without walking it back. This is someone who believes in nothing.
August jobs report gonna be like…
A fun reminder that a loss of 60,000 jobs in and around academia is ~50% more than all coal mining jobs in the entire country.
🤣🤣🤣
Reading the new biography?
TIL that Gaza is a little more than twice the size of Washington DC in terms of square miles (and roughly the same population density). Trying to fathom all of that death, destruction, displacement, and mass starvation in a place I know well and it’s just impossible.
For no particular reason, here's a chart of Louisiana's congressional delegation, by race, for every Congress since the Civil War. Top red line = end of Reconstruction; bottom red line = Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Terrible news for Columbia, but a silver lining is that Prof. Khalidi’s lectures will be streaming and public. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
So actually payrolls only increase 72,999?
Hot take: I'm kinda persuaded that Ghislaine Maxwell's conviction should be thrown out? (SCOTUS could decide at the end of September whether to hear the case, and there's a legit circuit split on the relevant issue: www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?...)
ME: “I’m sorry. I should have listened to you.” WIFE: “No! Just exist with the shame.”
A letter to Alan Garber & John Manning
Admittedly there’s a decent amount to work with. (But yeah, some years I start off 1L crim with McCleskey and this memo. It’s a hell of an icebreaker.)
2/2 The same prosecutors tried THREE TIMES to re-try him. Each case ended in a hung trial. And then they dropped the charges. (See book.) So, the dissent was willing to let Louisiana kill someone based on just a demonstrably wrong/false "materiality" prediction. www.amazon.com/Desire-Stree...
1/2 Reminder #7342 that Scalia was often the worst. Curtis Kyles was sentenced to death, but the DA hid lots of exculpatory evidence. SCOTUS tossed conviction. Scalia, in dissent, said it shouldn't matter because the case against Kyles was "massive." So what happened after the ruling?
Ohhhh, so suddenly you don't care about appointing more defense attorneys to the federal bench. Hypocrite.
My request of people who think I am too critical of Democrats is to simply *read the details* of the right-wing smear campaign against Adeel Mangi, whom Republicans tarred as anti-Semitic and “anti-police,” and tell me Dems were right to cave to this. inthesetimes.com/article/adee...
![Several years before his nomination, Mangi worked with the Alliance of Families for Justice (AF]), an anti-mass incarceration nonprofit that provides legal services to incarcerated people and support services to their families, to represent the family of a mentally ill man killed by a corrections officer; later, Mangi agreed to join the organization's board. Separately, AF] has pushed for the compassionate release of the incarcerated activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, and sponsored a fellowship named for the late Kathy Boudin, a criminal justice reformer who spent 22 years in prison for murder before her release in 2003. This is all a conservative media outlet needed to supplement the anti-Muslim campaign against Mangi, breathlessly framing tenuous connections between his professional experience and people convicted of crimes as evidence of his affiliation with](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:bpna2qi2e44fafbhhtqjak3x/bafkreibkgiykvrfikc3fw4j755e7rc5ugxcyrlwksoiyvat7sbs3aqb3ba@jpeg "Click to view full size")
This is why the Bove seat was vacant, and there’s a real throughline from the forces that defeated the previous Democratic nominee to where we are today. www.newyorker.com/news/the-pol...
In the other, ADAs hid the identity of a rape victim (cold case, assault decades earlier, DNA hit) until the middle of the trial. Turns out she had been in a sexual relationship with defendant at the time. (Trial ct vacated conviction, 3-0 app. ct. affirmed, LASC just barely affirms 4-3.)
Just binge-read every Louisiana Supreme Court opinion mentioning Brady v. Maryland since 2012 (there were 145) and now my eyes are bleeding. (If you're curious, TWO opinions found Brady violations. In one, they subsequently granted "rehearing" and reversed themselves.)
this is an explicitly white nationalist administration in a way that even woodrow wilson shied away from www.reuters.com/world/africa...
"There's no statute of limitations [in New York] for the same crimes she was charged with federally." But NY has a much broader double jeopardy rule than the one in the U.S. Constitution that would likely bar re-prosecution for the same offenses. We've already seen how this plays out.
That was in my "I'm kinda embarrassed by how much I like writing law review articles, so I'm going to publish under the most pretentious moniker possible, as a thinly veiled emotional defense mechanism" phase.
Woke up to text messages from students that they heard my law review article being quoted on their favorite podcast! (Thanks for tricking my students into thinking I'm cool, @socialistdogmom.bsky.social! And everyone should listen to Weird Little Guys if you're not already.)
Maybe we aimed too high by asking for 75% of the committee; a more realistic demand should have been "one professor for every investment banker / capital management professional."
Not the main point here, but Trump is directing the federal government to convince state supreme courts that they are interpreting state constitutions wrong where they’ve limited state law enforcement from warehousing the poor in state custodial facilities. #ourfederalism
I really like JOTWELL, and think it’s one of the better things our profession has going. But I would subscribe to this in a heartbeat.
Having actually read the agreement (you can too below), no self-respecting university administrator should sign anything remotely resembling this. president.columbia.edu/sites/defaul...
< updates slides for 5A grand jury clause day >
Thank you for sharing this; seems like wise advice!
Kelly's too modest to post this, but UVA Law's Decarceration & Community Reentry Clinic has now freed TWELVE people from life or multi-decade sentences over the past 3.5 years. That might be some kind of record? (And "getting people out of prison" is only a small fraction of their work.)
Okay, two points to the DC city planner that made sure Sherman Ave. ran right next to Georgia Ave., never out of eyesight nor more than 800 ft away.
Sure. But complicated by the fact that you’re negotiating with President Trump’s criminal defense attorney. The line between “ethical defense lawyering” and being party to _________ (not sure: witness tampering, some kind of accomplice-after-the-fact) could get a bit blurry.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like the rule book is kinda out the window here. Don’t envy the defense lawyer trying to walk that tightrope, though.
I gotta imagine this is a little like what Watergate felt like? I mean, the man waged SECRET WARS in Laos and Cambodia, and suddenly it’s this little B&E that does him in…
VA-05 is one of those red-leaning districts that has recently only elected Republican reps who vote and talk like it’s a R+40 district. In other words, somewhere Democrats can and should invest. Excited to see recent UVA Law grad Mike Pruitt throwing his hat in!
⚫️ La Direction de l’AFP partage l’angoisse exprimée par la SDJ quant à la situation effroyable de ses collaborateurs dans la bande de Gaza ⬇️
Banneker Pool lifeguards just cut off “Walking Trophy” and threatened to yank ~60 kids out of the water because of “hearing too much cussing and none of you are 21 to be cussing.” Youth chastened; good times resume.
I still can't believe we've reach the "say a racial slur or I'll yank millions in government subsidies" stage of the presidency and it's only been six months.
The 2d Cir.'s opinion in the Hernandez (Etan Patz) case involves something I've never seen: A JURY'S finding that a confession is inadmissible (even after the trial court denied a motion to suppress on the same grounds). Is this a NY thing? Common elsewhere? ww3.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/is...
For every insane thing President Trump does, there is a democracy-enhancing policy position (or positions) we can/should embrace. Worth keeping a list. Here, the answer is: DC Statehood.
I knew absolutely 0 about any of this.
Powell is in a nice library, lots of oak and leather, slowly lighting a cigar, right?
I’m reading a novel where a major plot point is the CIA and Murdoch conspiring to do a coup in Australia in 1975 and now I’m going down a rabbit-hole… en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged...
Haha, I agree. But i don’t think codifying Bivens (more specifically, adding the words “or of the United States” to Sec. 1983) necessarily codifies qualified immunity. All it would do is ensure a remedy in those already rare cases where QI doesn’t apply. Point taken though.
There’s a lot to do if/when we get past all *this*, but a requirement to run as a Democrat should be support for codifying Bivens. (If federal officials deprive you of clearly established constitutional rights, you should have the same remedies as when Georgia or Utah officials do. Winning issue.)
